Women’s Participation in the Jordanian Military and Police: An Exploration of Perceptions and Aspirations

• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Author: Katherine R. Maffey,David G. Smith
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18806520
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Women’s Participation in

the Jordanian Military and

Police: An Exploration

of Perceptions and

Aspirations

Katherine R. Maffey

1

and David G. Smith

2

Abstract

Cross-national research contends that women’s military participation has been

associated with military function and organization, social structure, culture, and

political factors. This exploratory study of Jordanian women suggests that these

factors and their subcategories simultaneously help and hinder them. Using Segal’s

updated model for women’s participation in the military, we explore how the

meaning of Jordanian military women’s experie nces compare in a cross-national

theoretical framework. We review Segal’s updated model variables and compare

it to interview data based on a grounded theory approach. Using semistructured

interviews with a nonrandom sample of women who served in the Jordanian military

or police, we place their experiences in a cross-national context and provide

exploratory qualitative analysis of how these women navigated social and cultural

norms. Our results showed that participants perceived their positive experiences

and ability to achieve aspirations as enablers to their success, which they considered

unlikely in the civilian workforce.

1

US Army, 2d Cavalry Regiment, Vilseck, Germany

2

Department of National Security Affairs, US Naval War College, Newport, RI, USA

Corresponding Author:

David G. Smith, Department of National Security Affairs, US Naval War College, Newport, RI 02841,

USA.

Email: david.g.smith@usnwc.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2020, Vol. 46(1) 46-67

ªThe Author(s) 2018

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0095327X18806520

journals.sagepub.com/home/afs

Keywords

women in the military, military culture, military social structure

While gender integration within militaries and police forces progresses globally, we

know very little about how women’s integration is progressing in Middle Eastern

nations except for Israel and recent research on Kurdish women fighting the Islamic

State (Bloom, 1982; Gal, 1986; Karazi-Presler, Sasson-Levy, & Lomsky-Feder,

2017; Nilsson, 2017; Sasson-Levy, Levy, & Lomsky-Feder, 2011). Arab nations

are more likely to hold traditional gender ideologies that emphasize sex-based

inequalities (Lussier & Fish, 2012; Rizzo, Abdel-Latif, & Meyer, 2007) and cou-

pling that with the traditionally patriarchal structures of militaries and police forces

creates a challenging intersectionality for women who serve. Within this research,

we explore a segment of the Jordanian population that defies these ideological

norms. Using a set of firsthand interviews to address how women who serve over-

come the myriad of challenges that they regularly face, we analyze our results based

on a grounded theory methodology.

Given the cultural context of the Jordanian military and police force, how do we

explain the ability of women to work and succeed? We suggest that a combination of

Jordan’s history, culture, recent advances for women in so ciety, and increasing

security needs allowed our interviewees to succeed despite persistent inequalities.

To support our data, we employ a cross-national framework on women’s military

participation and examine historical and sociocultural factors before analyzing our

interview data. While there are bodies of scholarship on Jordanian women and

Jordanian military history, there is a gap in the literature concerning women who

serve in Arab nations like Jordan. This research explores the meaning of military and

police service by Jordanian women in the context of their work and family roles.

Segal’s Model as a Theoretical Framework

Like women in other countries, Jordanian women’s military and police participation

is influenced by a variety of societal and institutional variables. To place Jordanian

women’s experiences in the context of cross-national research, we employ Segal’s

(1995) model as it was modified by Iskra, Trainor, Leithauser, and Segal (2002),

which is based on a series of studies including Australia, Mexico, and Zimbabwe,

giving us the cross-national context needed for understanding our interview data.

This model is consistent with Sandhoff, Segal, and Segal’s (2010) integrated

approach that includes factors in four analytical components: armed forces, social

structure, culture, and political. Sandhoff et al. (2010) compared militaries of the

United Kingdom, Canada, New Zeal and, Australia, the United States, Be lgium,

France, Italy, and Germany in their cross-national analysis. For our examination

of Jordan, we rely on this model’s components that include a cluster of variables to

Maffey and Smith 47